Fun article on the history of Choose Your Own Adventure books.
It mentions the idea of "cheating," but as a child who loved these books I never thought of it that way. I remember after trying to trace a path or two in my first CYOA I ended up simply reading it cover-to-cover, and I liked that enough that I read every subsequent one that way. And I genuinely enjoyed them! It seemed like a bother to laboriously trace each path when you could just appreciate the structure directly for what it is.
Maybe this is revealing of the kind of kid I was and the type of creator I am now.
People sometimes ask me what the canonical ending for Eliza is, and I tell them there are endings I like more than others, but really I meant all of the endings to sit side by side to each other. A story doesn't have to be "this happened or that happened" mutually exclusively, it can be "this happened but this other thing, that supposedly precludes the first thing, also happened," and lots of people think that's some newfangled postmodern thing but it isn't; different versions of myths have coexisted in peace for thousands of years... and so on.
